Episode #83: The Revolution's Roving Eye
Even before the military coup, Moe, a photojournalist, had long chronicled the inhumane injustices that the Tatmadaw had committed in his country. From the jade mines of Kachin to the Rohingya camps in Rakhine, he had seen first-hand how ruthless and evil the regime could be. Still, little could have prepared him for what was about to come. “When the crackdown started,” he says, “it was very brutal. It was something I have never seen in my life.”
Moe (not his real name) had worked on assignment for The New York Times, Wired, Time, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, and that work and those connections positioned him to begin capturing pictures as the first protests sprung up following the military coup. He has since taken some of the most powerful pictures of the movement. This interview represents the first time that Moe has opened up about his work since the coup began.
Our discussion starts with the genesis of his journalistic career, with a free seminar on photography that he attended at the Alliance Francaise in Yangon. That ended up changing his career direction, as he dropped his prior direction of study at the university in favor of experimenting with this new hobby.
In 2012, Aung San Suu Kyi had just been released from house arrest, and was starting to campaign. Moe tagged along and ended up capturing an iconic picture of her, which led to a job offer at an international news agency. He was on his way! As he matured in his profession, he realized he needed to develop a more in-depth relationship with his subjects. “It's really important for me to try and understand the story myself,” he says. “So that when I take the pictures, and when the pictures are published, and when the story is told, people need to understand it in the most accurate possible way.” This was not only out of concern for the subjects of his pieces, but also with an eye towards his audience inside the country. “I realize that I bear a responsibility to try and tell this story in the best possible way. Actually, many people in Myanmar don't know how things are, because before the country opened up in 2010, the only thing that the people were seeing and reading was government’s propaganda newspapers.” For this reason, Moe has taken the highly unusual step of not staying in hotels as most journalists do when working on a story, instead living among the communities he is reporting on—no easy task, given the places he has been assigned to. This evokes war correspondent Robert Capa’s perspective on photojournalism, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”
One particularly challenging area he visited was the jade mines region of Kachin state, in 2013. “I was blown away to see this lunar kind of landscape, where people appear really small. It's almost like ants going over a block of sweet candy or something.” If there was ever a story that would test his recently developed abilities as a photojournalist, this was it.
Although an exact figure is difficult to calculate, it’s been estimated that these mines, fueled largely by an insatiable Chinese market for the stone, produce as much as $31 billion annually, which amounts to about half of Myanmar’s national revenue. However, most of this profit goes to senior generals and cronies, along with their Chinese counterparts, with very little going back into the communities where these mines are located, which lack even sufficient electricity and adequate schools. The greed is simply incomprehensible! Moe even talks about entire mountains that were worn away to nothing just within the space of a year. And as if that’s not bad enough, the working conditions are extremely dangerous: not only do miners frequently die underground, but drug use is rampant, and some workers are actually paid in either heroin, or yaba, known as “crazy medicine”, a mix of methamphetamine and caffeine. Prostitution is a fact of life in the camps.
Moe visited these camps on several occasions; his stories on the jade mines are compelling, and his photographs are stunning, taking the viewer right into the jade miners world. His pieces have appeared not only in magazine spreads and articles, but have also been the subject of a short documentary.
But while the reality of the circumstances surrounding these Kachin jade mines is not that well-known even within Myanmar, when he started visiting the Rohingya camps, he was walking into a story that many international journalists were already beginning to report on. And unlike the situation in Kachin when Moe’s reportage did not stir much controversy within the country, many Bamar were already highly agitated by articles about the unfolding Rohingya catastrophe appearing regularly in foreign and domestic media. And what is more, there was widespread disbelief by many Burmese readers that these stories were actually true.
Moe was more than aware of this challenge when he was preparing to visit. He remembers: “Many people were saying, ‘Oh, the stories coming out of the camps, and the stories about the Rohingya, this is biased reporting from international media.’ I believed I had to talk to as many people as possible and spend as much time as possible.”
So Moe took an unusual angle on the crisis: instead of focusing on the historical or legal concerns of the Rohingya like most stories at the time—controversial issues in any case, and ones that skirted the day-to-day, real-life drama that was unfolding—he told a story that touched upon everyone’s shared humanity. It appears he was successful. By not reporting on the usual who-did-what-to-who of the crisis, Moe managed something that very few journalists had been able to do: humanize the Rohingya to a largely Bamar audience. “I could see that, despite the story being about Rohingya, there was a very emotional reaction from the [Bamar] people. At that point, it looks like they have forgotten the whole debate about Rohingya or Bengali and all this, and they were just focused on what's happening, what the story was about, because anybody could relate to it.”
While the jade mines and Rohyinga camps were the two hallmark stories of his career, Moe was also assigned to a wide variety of human interest stories as well. For example, he was once asked to visit Pa Auk Monastery in Pyin Oo Lwin and photograph a Vietnamese architect whose donation had supported several new buildings. Moe was impressed to find that this successful business tycoon was a very serious meditator, whose entire family routinely visited the monastery to take their own retreats. What is more, this Vietnamese yogi insisted that any new architect joining his firm must not only commit to taking a meditation course at Pa Auk, but also meditate every morning one hour before the workday begins.
As it was for most everyone, the February coup came as a tremendous shock to Moe. He was awakened by a call from a colleague at The New York Times, and he opened his door to find long lines at banks, ATMs, and supermarkets. At that moment, Moe was faced with a decision that was somewhat unique: should he document the events as an objective reporter, or join in the resistance as an activist? He chose to be a journalist, and started taking pictures that very afternoon. As the protest movement picked up across Yangon, he would head out to where he anticipated the tension the would be greatest. While he got some stunning, powerful— and tragic— images, he also faced personal danger, once barely escaping from advancing soldiers. Readers can view his recent work which appeared in the New York Times here: February 9, March 1, March 24, March 27.
In making the decision to bear witness to the unfolding events, Moe knew he had to adhere to the ethics of his profession. "I had to draw the line. I then made a decision to be objective and neutral, because especially in a story like this, it's really important that I just do my job. We all many different roles to play in this whole thing. And for me, my role is just to document what happens next.” In this regard, Moe is similar to his friend, the artist Bart Was Not Here, who also began producing revolutionary art but was clear in a recent interview that he was not making a political statement.
Although Moe took thousands of pictures every day, there are a few scenes that he frequently comes back to. One in particular was of a young child at the funeral of her father, who had been killed by soldiers. “She wasn't crying,” Moe says, “but she understood her loss and she really understood what was happening. At that moment, I just had to stop taking pictures.”
Such incidents tested his intention to do his job objectively. He had to train himself to “just focus in my viewfinder and try to capture what's happening in the best way possible of the atrocities. But there were times where I couldn't make it. It was too intense and I couldn’t keep shooting.”
Moe continued to report on events as a third wave of COVID engulfed his country, in spite of the fact that some of his own family got sick. He documented the widespread suffering caused by the Tatmadaw, who prevented people gaining access to life-saving medicine and medical equipment.
Moe’s archive of work was recently recognized by the Bayeux War Correspondents in Paris, who awarded him first prize for his photojournalism. Ironically, he had to accept the award anonymously for security reasons, preventing him from receiving well-deserved, widespread recognition (at least for now) for his high achievements in the field he has devoted his life to.
But Moe says, “I think it's better this way. “I'm proud, because I feel that it's not just me the prize is being awarded to, because there's all these other journalists who have been risking a lot everyday. Despite all the risks, they keep going there and working. We all share the same risk. Everybody works as best as we can to tell the story, and to document this.”
Moe could have decided to remain in the safety and security of France, but he chose to return to Myanmar to continue his work to document the country’s continuing revolution so that the world may see. He believes that the Burmese people will soon be triumphant, and he wants to be there to take their pictures when they are!